PayPal Issues when Abroad

[TonyM]

DON'T whatever you do try and use PayPal while abroad. I'm on business in South Africa and in a spare moment agreed to buy on Oople a motor. I went through the PayPal routine received an email to say funds have been sent. Then I received a PM from my seller to say PayPal are investigating my account!!

After much chasing around PayPal and expensive phone calls I was informed that my location had been picked up outside the UK and so my account was put on hold. I now have to produce copies of bank statements and driving license which of course are at home to unfreeze my account. Meanwhile my seller has sent the motor and I can't send him any money.

The friendly face of PayPal.

BTW I have put an official complaint forward to the EU. Surely it is illegal to inform a third party that my account is being investigated when there is no fault from my side.

[Si Coe]

First I've heard of this, and its all a bit draconian. Which leads me to suspect they've had a lot of fraud going on we haven't heard about and have put a clamp down on it. Knee jerk reactions like that tend to end up screwing lots of perfectly innocent people too because they haven't been properly thought out.

[poopers]

Keep contacting them about it, they've been known to take months to reactivate accounts, if at all. I used to deal with them a lot, terrible company.

I think this is a good site for info on what to do when you encounter problems:

http://www.paypalsucks.com/

That said, locking accounts, especially when doing transactions abroad, is fairly common I think. Even Visa have required me to do security checks quite regularly.

[Col]

personally, I think this is a great thing. It's just like the banks looking for unusual transactions on your cards.
I for one would not be happy if someone in SA had stolen my details and was using them to buy stuff.
Hope you get it sorted, though!

[NeilD]

I agree with Col, it might be a bit of a pain but not compared to somebody fleecing you.

[TonyM]

I agree with the sentiment, but unlike Paypal Visa don't inform the seller that a purchasers account is under investigation literally within 5 minutes of attempting a purchase.

Cheers Tony

BTW my wife has used the old fashioned postal order to pay.

=NeilD;284266]I agree with Col, it might be a bit of a pain but not compared to somebody fleecing you.[/quote]

[bodgit]

If you,ve got something like a thomas cook card they ask you to give them a few days notice if you intend to use it abroad. Thats good service.

[stical]

I have a VISA card from work that I only use to buy personal stuff with , ( well if travelling wasn't restricted I could have used it for work )

This year I received a letter from them stating there had been a general problem with fraud on several accounts and they send me a new card where as I didn't notice anything bizarre on my expenses with the old one.

And the Paypal checking your account thing is a nightmare.

Because I have a US ip address at work , my account was locked because of a transaction in May ( eurm, we're september now ).

When I got home the same day ( Belgium ip address) , it worked and my account wasn't locked .

Happened already twice with Paypal.

[djmcnz]

Yeah, well try moving countries!

Moved from New Zealand to Netherlands and couldn't load a NL credit card onto my NZ PayPal account. Okay, use my NZ card but then have shipping/billing address conflicts and PayPal notifies everybody automatically, confusing sellers and making them suspicious.

Had to close one PayPal account (had to wait for credit to be used up) then open another... have to do this every time I move countries (which is actually quite frequently).

PITA!

[TonyM]

I think if PayPal were open and warned people of trying to use the service out of their territory it would help. I had to chase round the houses and call the Irish call centre from South Africa before I weedled this out of them.

Strangely I've just received an email from PayPal saying my account is now up and running again after I provided verrification. I don't think so - I'm still in South Africa and so could not provide copies of the documents they are seeking. Anyway - I won't complain to them about it.

Tony

Originally Posted by djmcnz

Yeah, well try moving countries!

Moved from New Zealand to Netherlands and couldn't load a NL credit card onto my NZ PayPal account. Okay, use my NZ card but then have shipping/billing address conflicts and PayPal notifies everybody automatically, confusing sellers and making them suspicious.

Had to close one PayPal account (had to wait for credit to be used up) then open another... have to do this every time I move countries (which is actually quite frequently).

PITA!